Critical counter-conducts -- Who is the subject of (Foucault's human) rights? -- The ambivalence of rights -- Rights between tactics and strategy.

This book presents an original comprehensive approach to some of the most difficult problems concerning sense-perception and other mental states. After rejecting prevailing approaches, the author presents his own viewpoint which may be characterized as direct, critical realism. Basing his conclusions on conceptual analysis, psychological evidence and historical considerations, the author is able to offer new insights into traditionally unsolved problems concerning the nature of perceptual states, the ontological status of perceptual environment, the cognitive mechanism in perception and the explanation (...) of perceptual mistakes. The book also discusses the implications of this approach for other mental states such as memory and consciousness. (shrink)

Epicurus seems to have thought that death is not bad for the one who dies, since its badness cannot be located in time. I show that Epicurus’ argument presupposes Presentism, and I argue that death is bad for its victim at all and only those times when the person would have been living a life worth living had she not died when she did. I argue that my account is superior to competing accounts given by Thomas Nagel, Fred Feldman and (...) Neil Feit. (shrink)

This paper explores ethical issues raised by quadratic voting. We compare quadratic voting to majority voting from two ethical perspectives: the perspective of utilitarianism and that of democratic theory. From a utilitarian standpoint, the comparison is ambiguous: if voter preferences are independent of wealth, then quadratic voting out- performs majority voting, but if voter preferences are polarized by wealth, then majority voting may be superior. From the standpoint of democratic theory, we argue that assess- ments in terms of efficiency are (...) too narrow. Voting institutions and political institutions more generally face a legitimacy requirement. We argue that in the presence of inequalities of wealth, any vote buying mechanism, including quadratic voting, will have a difficult time meeting this requirement. (shrink)

Can a musical work be created? Some say ‘no’. But, we argue, there is no handbook of universally accepted metaphysical truths that they can use to justify their answer. Others say ‘yes’. They have to find abstract objects that can plausibly be identified with musical works, show that abstract objects of this sort can be created, and show that such abstract objects can persist. But, we argue, none of the standard views about what a musical work is allows musical works (...) both to be created and to persist. (shrink)

In the first chapter of his The World, Descartes compares light to words and discusses signs and ideas. This made scholars read into that passage our views of language as a representational medium and consider it Descartes’ model for representation in perception. I show, by contrast, that Descartes does not ascribe there any representational role to language; that to be a sign is for him to have a kind of causal role; and that he is concerned there only with the (...) cause’s lack of resemblance to its effect, not with the representation’s lack of resemblance to what it represents. I support this interpretation by comparisons with other places in Descartes’ corpus and with earlier authors, Descartes’ likely sources. This interpretation may shed light both on Descartes’ understanding of the functioning of language and on the development of his theory of representation in perception. (shrink)

The interactive theorem prover Isabelle/HOL is used to verify elementary theorems of classical extensional mereology.

In this article I defend a new argument against moralist theories of legitimacy and in favour of realist theories. Moralist theories, I argue, are vulnerable to ideological and wishful thinking because they do not connect the demands of legitimacy with the interests of rulers. Realist theories, however, generally do manage to make this connection. This is because satisfying the usual realist criteria for legitimacy – the creation of a stable political order that transcends brute coercion – is usually necessary for (...) rulers to preserve their rule. (shrink)

Social epistemologists often operationalize the task of indirectly assessing experts’ trustworthiness to identifying whose beliefs are more reliably true on matters in an area of expertise. Not only does this neglect the philosophically rich space between belief formation and testimonial utterances, it also reduces trustworthiness to reliability. In ethics of trust, by contrast, explicitly relational views of trust include things like good will and responsiveness. One might think that relational aspects can be safely set aside for social epistemology of trust (...) in experts, that such considerations may be relevant for personal relationships but not for expert trustworthiness. Against these claims I argue for the social-epistemic relevance of relational aspects of trust in experts, and to that end I discuss three sorts of considerations – responsively positive, neutral, and negative factors – that can make a difference for expert trustworthiness. (shrink)

_Foucault’s Law_ is the first book in almost fifteen years to address the question of Foucault’s position on law. Many readings of Foucault’s conception of law start from the proposition that he failed to consider the role of law in modernity, or indeed that he deliberately marginalized it. In canvassing a wealth of primary and secondary sources, Ben Golder and Peter Fitzpatrick rebut this argument. They argue that rather than marginalize law, Foucault develops a much more radical, nuanced and coherent (...) theory of law than his critics have acknowledged. For Golder and Fitzpatrick, Foucault’s law is not the contained creature of conventional accounts, but is uncontainable and illimitable. In their radical re-reading of Foucault, they show how Foucault outlines a concept of law which is not tied to any given form or subordinated to a particular source of power, but is critically oriented towards alterity, new possibilities and different ways of being. _Foucault’s Law_ is an important and original contribution to the ongoing debate on Foucault and law, engaging not only with Foucault’s diverse writings on law and legal theory, but also with the extensive interpretive literature on the topic. It will thus be of interest to students and scholars working in the fields of law and social theory, legal theory and law and philosophy, as well as to students of Foucault’s work generally. (shrink)

There is an ongoing debate in medicine about whether patients have a ‘right not to know’ pertinent medical information, such as diagnoses of life-altering diseases. While this debate has employed various ethical concepts, probably the most widely-used by both defenders and detractors of the right is autonomy. Whereas defenders of the right not to know typically employ a ‘liberty’ conception of autonomy, according to which to be autonomous involves doing what one wants to do, opponents of the right not to (...) know often employ a ‘duty’ understanding, viewing autonomy as involving an obligation to be self-governing. The central contribution of this paper is in showing that neither view of autonomy can reasonably be said to support the extreme stances on the right not to know that they are sometimes taken to. That is, neither can a liberty view properly defend a right not to know without limits, nor can a duty view form the basis of an absolute rejection of the right not to know. While there is still theoretical distance between these two approaches, we conclude that the views are considerably closer on this issue than they first appear, opening the way for a possible compromise. (shrink)

Since the heyday of analytic philosophy of education, a chill has come over the relationship between the philosophy of education and analytic epistemology. Wher.

This article discusses approaches to the problem of the number of preference orderings that can be constructed from a given set of alternatives. After briefly reviewing the prevalent approach to this problem, which involves determining a partitioning of the alternatives and then a permutation of the partitions, this article explains a recursive approach and shows it to have certain advantages over the partitioning one.

This is a bilingual edition of the selected peer-reviewed papers that were submitted for the International Symposium on Jesuit Studies on the thought of the Jesuit Francisco Suárez. The symposium was co-organized in Seville in 2018 by the Departamento de Humanidades y Filosofía at Universidad Loyola Andalucía and the Institute for Advanced Jesuit Studies at Boston College.

Gillian Piggott's study of the resonances between the work of Charles Dickens and Walter Benjamin arrives in the wake of an increasing critical interest in Benjamin's life and thought, as an array of books from Graham Gilloch's Myth and Metropolis: Walter Benjamin and the City (1996) to Esther Leslie's biographical Walter Benjamin (2007), and beyond, makes clear. While many critics have addressed Benjamin's importance to discussions of nineteenth-century modernity, Piggott's is the first booklength attempt to compare Benjamin and Dickens. Fler (...) goal is to produce a "creative comparison of the authors' responses to modernity" (4) rather than establish direct lines of influence, though she points out that Benjamin was aware of at least some of Dickens's work, particularly The Old Curiosity Shop and Great Expectations (11), and included fifteen entries about him in the Arcades Project (1927-40). (shrink)

Dummett and others have failed to show that an effect can precede its cause. Dummett claimed that 'backwards causation' is unproblematic in agentless worlds, and tried to show under what conditions it is rational to believe that even backwards agent-causation occurs. Relying on considerations originating in discussions of special relativity, I show that the latter conditions actually support the view that backwards agent-causation is impossible. I next show that in Dummett's agentless worlds explanation does not necessitate backwards causation. I then (...) show why even relative backwards causation is impossible in his and Tooley's scenarios of parallel processes in which causes apparently act in opposite temporal directions. We thus have good reasons for thinking that backwards causation is impossible. (shrink)

I review the book “Making Prehistory: Historical Science and the Scientific Realism Debate” by Derek Turner. Turner suggests that philosophers should take seriously the historical sciences such as geology when considering philosophy of science issues. To that end, he explores the scientific realism debate with the historical sciences in mind. His conclusion is a view allied to that of Arthur Fine: a view Turner calls the natural historical attitude. While I find Turner’s motivations good, I find his characterisation of the (...) historical sciences unconvincing. I say why in a section at the end of the review. The result is that I am unpersuaded by his thesis. (shrink)

A growing number of contributors to environmental philosophy are beginning to rethink the field’s mission and practice. Noting that the emphasis of protracted conceptual battles over axiology may not get us very far in solving environmental problems, many environmental ethicists have begun to advocate a more pragmatic, pluralistic, and policy-based approach in philosophical discussions abouthuman-nature relationships. In this paper, we argue for the legitimacy of this approach, stressing that public deliberation and debate over alternative environmental ethics is necessary for a (...) culture of democracy to be upheld in decision making and policy formulation. Then we argue for a democratically tempered environmental ethics that is grounded in a practical understanding of the character of moral claims regarding the natural world. We offer the results of an empirical study of environmental ethics held by the public to illustrate the diversity in their moral commitments to nature. Finally, we conclude with a discussion of the implications of this ethical pluralism for policy discussions about the management of American public lands. (shrink)

INTRODUCTION TO THE ARGUMENT AND ITS HISTORY PRIOR TO THE AND CENTURIES In the history of ideas, there is an argument that has been used repeatedly, ...

In this paper, I argue that, when it comes to explaining what can be described as “representational” properties of propositions, Soames’s new conception of propositions—on which the proposition that Seattle is sunny is the act of predicating the property being sunny of Seattle and to entertain that proposition is to perform that act—does not have an advantage over traditional ones.

We show that the arithmetical theory -INDx5, formalized in the language of Buss, i.e. with x/2 but without the MSP function x/2y, does not prove that every nontrivial divisor of a power of 2 is even. It follows that this theory proves neither NP=coNP nor.

In response to the fall of Constantinople in 1453, Nicholas of Cusa wrote De pace fidei defending a commitment to religious tolerance on the basis of the notion that all diverse rites are but manifestations of one true religion. Drawing on a discussion of why Nicholas of Cusa is unable to square the two objectives of arguing for pluralistic tolerance and explaining the contents of the one true faith, we outline why theological pluralism is compromised by its own meta-exclusivism.

Epikurs Philosophie ist Ausdruck seines Ringens um Orientierung. Es geht ihm nicht um ein abstraktes, theoretisches, auf Wahrheiten basierendes Lehrsystem, sondern um die Praxis eines gelingenden Lebens. Durch nüchterne Planung und Einsicht in die Abläufe der Natur will er Ängste vermeiden und eine sichere Orientierung auch im Umgang mit dem Ungewissen gewährleisten. Der Epikureismus lässt sich mit grundlegenden Begriffen und Konzepten der Philosophie der Orientierung deuten, darunter Vertrauen, Autorität, Plausibilität, Paradoxien, Orientierung in Routinen und Orientierung durch Achtung und Planung. -/- (...) In: Andrea Bertino / Ekaterina Poljakova / Andreas Rupschus / Benjamin Alberts (Hg.), Zur Philosophie der Orientierung, Berlin / Boston 2016, S. 33–48. (shrink)

This important book brings together leading environmental thinkers to debate a central conflict within environmental philosophy: Should we appreciate nature ...

John Rawls divides this theory into two parts that he calls ideal and nonideal theory. In this essay I argue that Rawls runs together two quite different conceptions of this dyad corresponding to the idea of strict compliance and realistic utopia respectively. These conceptions employ different criteria of classification, are motivated by different concerns, and have different practical upshots. I present a view that combines the two coherently on Rawls’ behalf while remaining true to his intentions. But I argue that (...) even this amended view is unsatisfactory. Although the realistic utopia conception is well motivated, strict compliance is problematic. The upshot is that we can embrace the division of the theory of justice into ideal and nonideal theory, while rejecting the strict compliance understanding of ideal theory. (shrink)

Educators continue to struggle with how masculinities are performed and regulated in spaces of learning. In a time of rapid social change, there is a renewed impetus for gender justice reform in schooling, though these approaches themselves remain a shifting picture. Adding a new layer of complexity, we are now witness to educational policy recommendations around surveillance which are designed to counteract boys’ and young men’s vulnerabilities to be radicalised into the misogynies of the ‘manosphere’. These recommendations exist despite limited (...) research and significant gaps in our understanding regarding both the manosphere as well as the emotional lives of young men. The article intentionally shifts the conversation from reactive surveillance in schools to educative gender justice approaches. We focus, in particular, on the significance of ‘pedagogic discomfort’ in terms of fostering gender transformative dialogue which is critical of ideas associated with the manosphere. We consider how a constructive dialogue might be fostered with a particular focus on pedagogies that recognise the emotional intensities of gender justice work. (shrink)

Abstract The distinction between thick and thin concepts has been a central part of recent discussion in metaethics. Whilst there is a debate regarding how best to characterise the distinction, it is commonly accepted that ethical theorising traditionally focuses on the thin, leading some to contend that moving from considering thin to thick concepts leads to a very different, and preferable, conception of ethics. Not only does a similar distinction between thick and thin concepts suggest itself within epistemology, traditional discussion (...) within epistemology also seems to focus on the thin in a similar manner. The question of a possible parallel beckons: Is there a comparable distinction between thick and thin epistemic concepts? Would a move from thin to thick lead to an alternative and/or preferable epistemology? (shrink)